Songfic

So I stayed in the city alone for Pride/Jazz Festival/some sort of crime writers literary festival/it was extremely hot/multiple street protests and it allowed me time to experience all the major modern emotions. Joy, sorrow, rage, longing, sweatiness, wistfulness, why are so many people sleeping on the TTC, Michelin star restaurant, drunk girl being hauled home by friends, fingernail moon, cacophony of children screaming with joy sounds like terror, Iran, showing up at Pride by accident while wearing a smock and eating an apple, swimming, the bluest sky, is this pool heated or is it just hot out?, wet cats, fireworks in the street, babysitting, barking, what is the city doing for unhoused people exactly, hugs, and naps. We are not out of the woods yet, as Mark is still not back until Tuesday afternoon, but so far, it’s ok. I mean, basically, more or less, somewhat….

I have of course been reading a lot, because always and especially when there is not much else to do. But also I have been listening to a lot of music. And when I listen to music AND there is not much else to do, I think very hard about the music and imagine what the song is about. I like song lyrics that are narratives but if they are not exactly narratives I will make up a narrative in my mind. I do not always do this completely consciously. If I am, say, listening to a song that is new to me while washing dishes or folding laundry, I will try to imagine the people and situations that whoever wrote it was thinking about it, and maybe spin out a whole story or part of a story, or imagery behind a story—sort of narrative wallpaper.

I don’t tend to write these stories for realsies because I think of them as someone else’s, but the narrative wallpaper thing does prove useful sometimes. I do have some pieces of fiction that are, at least to me, wallpapered in certain pieces of music. There would be no conceivable way to tell this as a reader, I am pretty sure. And I’m sure a lot of other writers do this too.

Some writers—some other sorts of writers—take it a lot further. At an undisclosed point in history, I read a lot of fanfiction, and in fanfiction there is a thing call a “songfic.” Songfics don’t exist in the non-fanfiction world, for the same reason fanfiction itself of the literary equivalent of the cousin we don’t talk about—copyright. Fanfiction, if you’ve never been on the internet before, is when writers take an existing creative work—usually a movie or TV, sometimes a book or series of books—and write some other stories about it. Sometimes they are simply fleshing out the universe, or writing what they feel is implied goes on after the credits roll—other times fanfiction flat out contradicts the established fiction. I believe the general consensus is that the first kind—the kind that does not bust through the parameters of the original work—is best, but I have not been a dedicated reader of this type of writing in a long time. The literary jury is also out on whether there’s any value in this type of writing, although I personally would certainly say yes. It’s a type of scaffolded invention—the characters and world-building already done for you, all you have to provide is event and plot—that proves very inviting to young or novice writers, and often a gateway drug to more wholesale invention. I never wrote any fanfiction of my own, but I watched others develop and i was impressed. It’s one way, I believe, people learn to write well.

But to my original point, fanfiction is not publishable because it involves a writer using someone else’s intellectual property. So it exists mainly on the internet on unpaywalled sites with lots of “for entertainment only/we’re not trying to claim ownership here/no one is making any money” disclaimers, and still they occasionally get taken down. But once you are doing THAT, why not start using some song lyrics? Song lyrics work GREAT in short stories and I would love to use them at least occasionally, and I think so would many writers, but music publishers are among the most expensive for reproduction rights—even for a single line—and the most litigious if you fail to gain permission properly. Most writers cannot afford to permission a word of popular music, and any publisher worth their salt will not take the chance on burying a stolen line and hoping for the best. If you find a popular song lyric in a novel with proper permission neatly on the front copyright page, you can assume that author has made the big time, and if you find a song lyric with no permission line you can assume neither the author nor the publisher knows what they are doing and might get hit for a lot of money.

What was I talking about?

Oh yeah, song fics. These are essentially a messy vague fictional version of glossas, a poetic form wherein a poet creates a poem working with a quatrain of another poet’s work. Glossas are beautiful and interesting work, and you see them somewhat regularly because poets retain their own publishing rights (instead of selling them to publishers, as songwriters do for the most part) and poets tend to be generous and collaborative (it is very possible that songwriters are also generous and collaborative—I have heard that they are!—but music publishers aren’t, so that puts a stop to them collaborating using published work, and I don’t know too much about the rest of the songwriting process).

So what you do in a songfic is take the lines from the song that you are inspired by and use them as section heads or intertitles or even weave them into dialogue if you think that will work (I don’t find it works, but whatever) and use it to shape the story. It’s such an interesting thing to do if you listen to a lot of music with strong lyrics. Sometimes honestly I do this and then pull out all the intertitles at the end of the writing process and see if I can make the thing stand on its own. It can work really well just to use the lyrics as a jumping off point for drafting and leave them out of the final product.

Obviously, if you aren’t an obsessive music listener—or prefer instrumental music, or are wary of muddying the pure stream of your own creative vision—this might not the path for you. But it’s an interesting writing exercise to try sometime if it sounds appealing or, if nothing else, just an fyi of another thing some people do, of which there is an almost infinite variety.